Deborah Jin, a physicist at NIST and CU-Boulder, has been awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship worth $500,000. Jin, who works at JILA, a joint lab between NIST and CU-Boulder, is being recognized for her groundbreaking research in quantum physics. She and her team have created a new quantum gas that was named one of the top 10 scientific advances of the year by the journal Science. Their work involves cooling fermions (a type of quantum particle) to extremely low temperatures using lasers and magnetic traps, allowing them to study the fundamental building blocks of matter.
Jin is the fourth CU-Boulder faculty member to receive a MacArthur Fellowship in the past four years. The fellowship is awarded to individuals who show exceptional creativity and promise for future advances. Jin’s research could lead to new atomic clocks and atom lasers, and may help us better understand the basic building blocks of matter.
Keywords: fermions, atomic, lasers, quantum
